Sunday, September 20, 2015

Panzer Battles Normandy - AAR, Part 2: Pressure Mounting and a General Paucity of Good News

The Germans are not willing to let us just own the ridge. At the "Factory", they start to move troops for a counter-attack. At Verrieres, they hide at their trenches, picking up the right time to fire.

0700

On the west flank, the Calgary Highlanders stand fast onto Objective "Factory" (brown box with a 50 and a Canadian symbol). On the center the Black Watch stumbles onto yet another German position. Their tank support (1st Royal Tank Regiment, highlighted yellow is busy dealing with German grenadiers on top of a hill (1 man down legend). On the east flank, the Hamilton Regiment and start to move onto objective Verrieres. Tanks from the 1st Hussars Regiment are on the lead, which is a risky proposition because there are multiple concealed German positions on those fields.

This is game play from the soon to be released Panzer Battles Normandy. Graphics and game play functionality are subject to change. The briefing for this scenario can be found here. For a better view of the screenshots, right click and open in a new tab. Short entry tonight!

Redeployment: those tanks moving are from the 1st Hussars Regiment and from the Sherbrooke Fusiliers Regiment. They are to be employed in the east flank, supporting the attack on Verrieres.

The rest of the tanks from the above mentioned formations (highlighted red) are already in the east flank and taking fire from German infantry. There are no losses and they move south through the wide cut in the terrain.

In this screenshot the yellow highlights are for units with spent action points. Really helpful for those who tend to forget to move some units. The point of this screenshot is to show the movement south onto Verrieres by the Royal Hamilton Regiment. There are multiple German machine guns in Verriers and closing with the enemy is proving to be costly (C Company is taking losses, see 2 men legend). Note also how some of the tanks from 1st Hussars Regiment and from the Sherbrooke Fusiliers Regiment are making it south through that valley/cut in the terrain.

0730

The Calgary Highlanders at Objective "Factory", trying to avert the chances of being assaulted by the German troops lurking just south of them (German troops below "The Factory" legend), do fire. This gets them no success and the undivided attention of the whole valley of the Orne river. Choke full of German AT guns, howitzers and MGs, the German muzzles hit Canadian youth and add to the horrible carnage. German armor has just arrived. When it rains, it pours!

The Highlanders need to keep their heads down. With this interface you check how the units use their opportunity fire (how they react when they spot units moving). I hope the Calgary Highlanders don't fire that much because when they do, they can get spotted by an enemy unit that didn't see them before.

Stay tuned, all I have published covers just half the scenario's duration.

Those tiles are actually grain and other agricultural fields. They stand out more here than on the default map as the ground condition is soft (darker) in this particular scenario and that accentuates the lighter fields. It looks a lot more natural on a 'normal' map.

That said I will see what I can tweak to have them not appear so jarring. There are a number of field types shown here with the green with orange soil a possible standard that could replace the lighter wheat fields.

Hi DavidThanks for the response.Looking at http://www.maplandia.com/france/basse-normandie/calvados/caen/fontenay-le-marmion/ it appears the older stands of field are left within the L'Orne bend. Not sure about making field and hex parameters the same.

Beautiful AAR! Things are definitely heating up. Personally, I've always found the JT maps to be extraordinarily detailed and a lot of fun to play on. You can't just move your units across them like they were sailing over the sea. They mimic the difficulty well of moving through tough terrain especially when defended by entrenched ENY units.